An Exercise In Gaslighting: GOP Wrings Hands About Fraud After Crushing The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-09-19-gop-wrings-hands-about-fraud-after-crushing-cfpb/



Republican lawmakers at yesterday’s House Committee on Financial Services hearing called for a coordinated national response to the epidemic of fraud sweeping America while simultaneously supporting the evisceration of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was a coordinated national response to the epidemic of fraud sweeping America. They bemoaned scam after scam—ones involving data brokers, cryptocurrency, online payment programs, honeypot schemes, and “pig butchering”—the practice of stealing money by tricking someone into putting ever-increasing amounts of money into a digital asset wallet—all of which the now-mothballed CFPB had been working on, in some cases for years. The proceeding was, as ranking member Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) put it, “a sham.”

“Fraud in Focus: Exposing Financial Threats to American Families” was the GOP’s latest attempt to cover up its destruction of the CFPB and feign concern about regular Americans. Committee members heard harrowing figures from witnesses. National Consumer Law Center senior attorney Carla Sanchez-Adams noted in her testimony that consumers reported $12.5 billion in fraud losses to the Federal Trade Commission last year, that the Pew Research Center says nearly three-quarters of American adults have been scammed, and that the CFPB could help stop that.

Doing so, however, would require Republicans to end their war on the agency, which dates all the way back to when it opened for business in 2011. Financial Services Committee Republicans finally had their chance under Trump II. Since taking over the CFPB earlier this year, Christian nationalist and Project 2025 author Russell Vought has tormented the 1,500-strong workforce nonstop, locking them out of the building and twice attempting to fire everyone, which courts blocked. Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the mass firings could proceed, but that ruling did not take effect immediately. Workers have been in limbo for months while their representatives and others seek the court’s reconsideration, doing essentially nothing on what amounts to paid leave while financial scams proliferate around the country.



Republicans have tried eliminating all of the CFPB’s funding, first trying to use the mega-bill to slash the amount of money it could draw from the Federal Reserve to zero. The Senate’s parliamentarian said no, but allowed them to cut the funding cap almost in half, to 6.5 percent of the Fed’s total operating expenses, reducing available funds by hundreds of millions of dollars. While gutting the workforce and infrastructure, Vought has also overseen the erasure of the CFPB’s work, as the Prospect has extensively reported. Among other ways, the agency has permanently dismissed 22 public enforcement actions, including against Capital One, a repeat offender, for cheating people out of more than $2 billion in interest payments on savings accounts.

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